This isn't news, but I never cease to find fascinating the conditions under which Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein. The weather in the summer of 1816 was utterly bizarre, with freezing temperatures and thunderstorms. Mary Shelley spent that summer in Switzerland with her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, her cousin Claire Clairmont (who had a child with Byron), and Byron's doctor John Polidori. Byron proposed that the literary group each write a ghost story to pass the time. Mary produced Frankenstein and Polidori wrote the precursor to the modern vampire story.
A decent study of Mary Shelley and the summer of 1816: The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.
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